“The Left Wing attack on ontological reality”
So the CPE is to be scrapped. Victories of this sort are strangely double-edged. Of course, the reminder of the power of political action can be an impetus for further action. But a victory like this is always partial, but the framing of the action in specific terms can lead to a demobilization which allows for the same outcome by other means. The talk of replacing the CPE with “measurements in favour of the professional insertion of the young people more in difficulty,” makes clear the danger here. As I’ve said before, the problem with single-issue campaigns is that they focus on one issue too many.
Besides which, I think Rachel was quite right to look at the limitations of the defensive way in which the anti-CPE campaigns have been articulated (as well as k-punk, see this older article from Angela of the archive). Bat proposed the slogan, “be unrealistic, demand the possible,” and this looks like it would provide a justification for a certain defensiveness. After all, the actually existing employment protection or welfare state are a fortiori possible, and so seem to disprove capitalist realism’s claim to define the possible. But I wonder if this is true. Capitalism’s spurious discourse of novelty
is always capable of declaring that the actually existing is no longer possible, that is, to render something impossible without any regard to what we might want to regard as the facts. To base our struggle on the possible, then, even something we can rigorously demonstrate to be possible, is to choose to fight on terrain dominated by capitalism.
What’s right about bat’s slogan, though, is the distinction he implies between utopianism and revolutionism. A properly revolutionary impossibilism can’t just put forward any impossibility we might happen to like (although I’m fond of Fourier’s talk of anti-whales and anti-beavers catching fish for us after the revolution). What we need to do is find the impossible within the actual. I’m reminded of Derrida’s quasi-transcendentalism. Although it’s sometimes taken to be, like Blackburn’s quasi-realism, a kind of bad-faith transcendentalism in which we act as if there were a transcendental support even though we “know” there isn’t, this is an entirely incorrect reading of Derrida (indeed, so wrong it probably doesn’t deserve to be called a reading at all). What Derrida actually says is that the quasi-transcendental shows that a condition of possibility is also a condition of impossibility. This could be taken as a kind of nihilism, but I prefer to interpret it, as John Caputo does, as a messianic argument for the possibility of an absolutely different future. The point is, capitalist reality is no less impossible than the communist future; the difference lies in who has the power to enforce their impossibility.
I was recently reading Wendy Brown’s States of Injury, as it is one of the set books in a class I’m grading papers for. I was pleased to see that Brown (writing in 1995) makes arguments against defensive left-wing projects which have a lot of resonance with the arguments being put forward around the CPE. Amusingly, a number of the students described Brown as saying that “we should be amoral and concentrate on struggling for power.” That’s a funny way to put it, but they do sort of have the right idea.
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But Tim, surely the scrapping of the CPE is a classic victory for the bourgeoisie at the expense of the proletariat? Insiders fought to protect themselves from outsiders – the poor, the immigrants.
Comment by Alistair @ 4/11/2006 5:07 am
Well, it seems like part of what the CPE did was allow for more stratification of job security, and I would have thought the poor and immigrants would be likely get the greatest share of that insecurity; also, you’re suggesting that it’s a binary opposition, where the sacrifice of the slightly better off is the only way to help the very worst off. Obviously there’s at least one more option (i.e., worldwide communist revolution).
Still, there’s some truth to what you say. That’s another reason to not cast left-wing projects in defensive terms, thinking about it - it will tend to favor those who won past struggles (the labor aristocracy), rather than the more marginalized. And the government seems to be talking about scrapping the CPE by saying, basically, “don’t worry, we’ll change the law so it only affects the people in the banlieus.”
Comment by tim @ 4/11/2006 9:22 am
Great post.
Comment by Matt @ 4/14/2006 4:22 pm
dunno if you found the blog covering all this:
libcom.org/blog
Comment by hibs @ 4/16/2006 9:23 am